Online Dating Insider » pr

Speeddate.com Dating Formula PR

David Evans — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:03:18 +0000

The folks at Formula PR have a good sense of humor.

We are pleased to announce that SpeedDate.com, the world’s first online speed dating Web site, and Formula took their relationship to the next level and are officially together. For information on the world of online dating, survey results and expert commentary on love in the virtual age, please be sure to get in touch with us.

Nicely done. Actually got me to visit their site and introduce myself.

Evaluating Dating Site Press Releases

David Evans — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:02:35 +0000

Press Release Grader is a web service for grading the quality of press releases. I’ve run a few dating site releases through and the highest grade so far was 89. Many score in the mid-60′s. I ran a recent BlackPeopleMeet press release through the HubSpot Press Release Grader. Here are the results.

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The Rise Of Group Dating

David Evans — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:23:27 +0000

The 8at8 blog, Tales From The Table, has reprinted a story about group dating from the Wall Street Journal.

Is group dating gathering steam in the 20-something set, or is this just a fad? One thing is clear, 20-somethings are not getting what they need from generic internet dating.

In many ways, 21st-century group-dating is a confluence of its past iterations. It’s become a way for people to identify with youth culture, the Facebook generation’s rebellion against the traditional dating model, and a means for women to dial down the pressure of today’s hypersexualized dating scene. All while increasing the odds that these faces in a crowd will find the right someone.

If your dating site sends out press releases, take a moment to read the entire article. Notice how the reporter writes about several group dating companies, not only 8by8. The piece is more of a survey of the group dating landscape, complete with historical perspective, informative, interesting and well written. All dating site press releases should follow this example. Thats what will get you mentioned in the WSJ as opposed to generic internet coverage. Not that getting mentioned in the Journal will make or break your company, but it certainly elevates your brand above the fray of dating sites competing for attention, at least for a few days.

Getting Bloggers to Write About Your Dating Site

David Evans — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:13:46 +0000

Last week I presented on a panel at the Boston University Communications School. Chris Brogan, founder of PodCamp, was on the panel, and I was thrilled to sit next to him. We talked about the role of technology in Public Relations.

Speaking of PR, Cory Doctorow has a good article in Information Week about making it easy for bloggers to link to you. I am posting this in the hopes that the PR people who are responsible for promoting their dating site clients will adhere to at least some of these rules.

Why do I care? I get a ton of press releases. The majority go in the trash. Sites based on interesting concepts often get the nod. Another niche site usually won’t. This blog isn’t Tech Crunch, and being mentioned here isn’t going to get you your initial 50,000 members.

I should remove “news” from the headline of the blog, because this is all about commentary.

This week a woman emailed myself and 300 journalists (not to confuse me with a real journo) about a company. Problem is, she didn’t use the bcc: field in her email client, so I got, free of charge, an incredible amount of email addresses for reporters at the New York Times and other high-value contacts. Oops.

I mentioned the speaking engagement at BU because a lot of what I talked about wasn’t technology, but story telling. Press releases need to tell stories to be interesting to reporters. Most, sadly, do not.

A new site launch is usually not much of a story. You’ll get a few mentions in small town papers and a few websites, but that’s not what your dating site needs. You need massive amounts of inbound traffic, as cheap as possible.

PR doesn’t do that. Many site owners get excited when their traffic spikes after sending out a press release. Then they are crestfallen when the traffic drops back down a few days later.

If you have a great story to tell, your story will go viral. Bloggers will pick it up, people will mention you on Twitter and other social media channels.

That’s where the buzz starts. I can’t tell you how many times I see articles in the NY Times that talk about topics I saw on blogs Twitter or Google Groups 4 months earlier.

Start with the early-adopters, maybe shoot a marketing video for YouTube, the opportunities are endless, the only limit is your imagination. Not everyone needs a video, but believe me, after reading 25 press releases, anything to stop the boredom is welcome.

Regarding sending press releases as MS Word documents, PDF’s or 100 MB videos. It’s 2008, use html. If you do send html releases, don’t write the release in Word and then export as html. Microsoft Word leaves in a ton of proprietary crap that makes pasting into a blog post a 15 minute affair. Into the trash it goes.

Tell me who else is talking about your company. Links to other blogs and news outlets are helpful and give you added credibility.

Learn from your experiences. If nobody is talking about your company, find out why? Don’t email me and say you are following up on the release you sent me last week. Ask me why I haven’t written anything. There could be 10 reasons why. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know.

I’m off to read some press releases.

Time Magazine: Eharmony Worst Dating Site

David Evans — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:46:02 +0000

Time Magazine has named eharmony.com one of the top five worst sites on the web. Ouch, that’s going to leave a mark.

Personality profiling will be front and center in coming months.

Markus gets it right, the Chemistry.com “Rejected” anti-eHarmony campaign initiated the investigation into eHarmony’s exclusionary practices (if reporters copying what other reporters say without understanding the entire issue is an investigation). Once the media caught wind of the situation and the pile-on began, it was clear that eHarmony lost the battle to Chemistry, but what of the war, because like it or not, that is what the skirmish between the two has become.

(Disclaimer: I have done some work with Chemistry in the past.)

Does anyone else feel like eHarmony has been more focused on hardware upgrades than media relations and PR this year?

There is something to be said about keeping your mouth shut and focusing on taking over a large portion of the online dating market, which eHarmony has accomplished brilliantly in a few short years, leaving the majority of the online dating industry to fight over the precious few daters that pay for the privilege of belonging to a date-warehouse.

“No comment” has always been the party line at eHarmony in regards to the whole pro-Christian/anti-gay allegations. Why open the company to the scrutiny of the media and public when there are hundreds of millions of dollars to be made? The problem for eHarmony now is that they have no choice in the matter. High-powered PR operatives experienced with damage control are in place and certainly putting together a response, be it marketing-focused or in the courts. Make no mistake, eHarmony brought this on themselves. Bringing this courtside would probably do more harm than good for both parties, especially Chemistry, which is the new kid on the block and can’t afford the distraction at such a critical time in the company’s lifecycle.

Eharmony has established itself in the dating market, but at what cost to singles?

Eharmony is certainly going to feel the sting of the Chemistry.com ad campaign, which if they play their cards right, will be worth much more than the $12 million ad campaign which put the “Rejected” ads in front of prime time viewers on shows like The Office.

You have to give it to Chemistry, those ads are compelling, funny and make you think, which is a lot more than I can say for any other online dating ad I’ve seen on tv.Yahoo! Personals France has dome some pretty interesting ads, but those are, a bit too French for the American market.

The interesting thing is that it doesn’t matter how many people are on Chemistry or what their test is like. Is it demonstrably more efficient than the eHarmony test? Who knows? I’ve spend time with Helen Fisher, who created the test for Chemistry, and I like her basis for the test, but when it comes to results, the jury is still out.

Food for thought: Imagine how popular eHarmony would be if they came out with a 50-question test for those currently excluded.

Further reading: Time did a piece, Is eHarmony Biased Against Gays? back in June. Or, as usual, Google is your friend.

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